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Overview

From the bestselling novelist and author of The Invention of Solitude, a moving and highly personal meditation on the body, time, and language itself

"That is where the story begins, in your body, and everything will end in the body as well.

Facing his sixty-third winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations—both pleasurable and painful.

Thirty years after the publication of The Invention of Solitude, in which he wrote so movingly about fatherhood, Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir in which he writes about his mother's life and death. Winter Journal is a highly personal meditation on the body, time, and memory, by one of our most intellectually elegant writers.

What People Are Saying

From the Publisher

"This august author’s meandering meditation on time, aging, and the eventual death of his mother beguiled many readers with its mix of pungent poetics and humble reminiscence." – Elle Magazine, Readers’ Prize Winner

"His concerns will be familiar to many readers, but because he is Paul Auster, he is uniquely able to reflect on them for the rest of us…. Riveting… Writing in the second-person, almost as if talking about someone else or as if speaking with a stranger, Auster, oddly enough, establishes a powerful intimacy with the reader."— Haaretz

“[A] graceful, moving new memoir... a kaleidoscopic reflection from one of our most important writers as he enters life’s winter.... Auster’s brilliance is in how he makes his deep love for his subjects palpable.... With Winter Journal, Auster has given us a remarkable mosaic of his mother and his second wife, the most vital women in his life, while, at the same time, allowing readers to catch glimpses of themselves in the expansive life that’s woven together in this stirring memoir.” —Alex Lemon, Dallas Morning News

“Each year, when the inevitable hand-wringing begins over the American drought in winning the Nobel Prize for literature, I’m always surprised that more critics don’t push Paul Auster.... The recent knock against American literature is that it's ‘insular’ and ‘isolated,’ at least according to one grumpy Nobel Prize judge. As an antidote to those gripes, I’d like to press a few of Mr. Auster’s books into more Swedish hands…. Mr. Auster’s prose is sharp and the plots are coiled. And best of all, his stories are addictively entertaining…. Mr. Auster has written a spare meditation that’s thoroughly entertaining. In short, Winter Journal might contemplate the past, but it reinforces Paul Auster’s status as a writer at the peak of his talents.” —Cody Corliss, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Fascinating… Strikingly bold and original... Think of it as a literary cousin of Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical film, ‘Amarcord’ (‘I remember’) — only this time, we watch the protagonist grow up and become pensively aware of his mortality.” —Doug Childers, Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Paul Auster’s novels are mesmerizing reverie, often chilly to the touch yet exploding with exponential warmth on deeper consideration. The same can be said for Winter Journal, a new memoir that comes three decades after his first, The Invention of Solitude. Here, Auster surveys the physical, emotional and spiritual landscapes of his life, then deconstructs these touchstones one unreliable memory at a time. Deeply musical, often darkly funny ruminations on baseball, becoming a middle-aged orphan after his mother’s passing, the enduring power of love, and an intimate history of his own body’s pains and pleasures weave together to confirm that while no one gets out of this world alive, each moment can be transcendent.” —J. Rentilly, American Way

“[A] powerful new memoir…. Periodically, Auster writes these long sentences, gently pulling them like threads from the fabric of his imagination. Perhaps you learned them as run-ons, but Auster’s are wonders of clarity and cumulative clout. As Auster escorts you through his life, you realize Winter Journal works like your own mind. It tells stories; it remembers, moves on, revisits; it sorts and classifies; it judges. Feels.” —Daniel Dyer, The Plain Dealer

“Readers of [Paul Auster’s] string of beguiling novels, which include The New York Trilogy, The Brooklyn Follies and Sunset Park, will enjoy picking out the autobiographical roots of some of his fiction…. Thoughtful ruminations on the nexus between the mundane and the meaningful, the physical and the emotional.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR.Org

“Unusual, affecting…. To experience Auster’s fixation on the body— and his way of staging that fixation as something you're complicit in—is to realize that most memoirs don't work this way. Not even the ones that focus on illness and death. Memoirs tend to be psychological studies of how one person's mind worked through something. Winter Journal instead foregrounds the physical; on the first page Auster states his intention to catalog ‘what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one.’ With psychological interpretations stripped off, what's left is a more visceral accounting…. What becomes clearer, and in its closing pages more potent, is the way this physical self-scrutiny amplifies his emotional responses.” —Mark Athitakis, Barnes & Noble Review

“[A] remarkable meditation on 'what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one.' Notice his use of the second person? One of the first pleasures of Winter Journal is its feeling of immediacy, as if we are inside Auster’s head staring with him into memory’s mirror, listening to him talk to himself.... Auster catalogs his memories with all the entertaining artistry of the best medieval poets.” —Alden Mudge, Bookpage (Top Nonfiction Pick for September)

“[In Winter Journal] one of the nation’s most revered fiction writers looks back at his life — and contemplates age and mortality — in a gripping memoir that hopscotches across the decades.”—Chris Waddington, New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Winter Journal takes up the conceit of a detachable self and develops it... An engaging book.” —James Campbell, The Wall Street Journal

“For a reader of a certain age, perhaps a male reader of a certain age, there's a sharp shudder of recognition at the admission of minor vices, of neglect and breakdown, of the slow ravages of the body over time. As someone who shares many of these predilections, I find myself rendered nearly breathless by Auster’s willingness to tell.” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“Winter Journal is far more elegiac than angry, more wistful than soaked in regret.... When you read Auster’s final page, you will feel you have been in the company of a man whose life has had more ups than downs, more times to celebrate than memories to drown. Added pleasure will come from the clear, inventive prose that has marked Auster’s equally inventive novels through the years, from his New York trilogy to more recent books like Invisible and Sunset Park.... When you reach the end of the book, you will have appreciated the journey as much as he clearly has.” —Dale Singer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“An idiosyncratic memoir that is at times cerebral, at times bawdy, and in every sense consistently rewarding... Whether you experience what Auster calls the ‘journey through winter’ literally or figuratively, this book will serve as a worthy companion when you embark on it.” —Harvey Freedenberg, Bookreporter.com

“Auster’s memoir recalls his free-spirited mother and the history of his own body. We experience Auster’s appetite for food and drink and literature but foremost for sex, as well as the crippling panic attacks that plagued him after his mother’s death, the epiphany he experienced watching a dance performance that cured his writer’s block, and the intense shame of nearly killing his family in a car accident. Over time, as Auster’s body alternately ages and is revitalized, the composition of these elements creates an intimate symphony of selves, a song of the body for all seasons.” — Vanity Fair

“The acclaimed novelist, now 65, writes affectingly about his body, family, lovers, travels and residences as he enters what he calls the winter of his life…. Auster’s memoir courses gracefully over ground that is frequently rough, jarring and painful… A consummate professional explores the attic of his life, converting rumination to art.”

—Kirkus, Starred Review

“[A] quietly moving meditation on death and life… This is the exquisitely wrought catalogue of a man’s history through his body.”

—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“An intensely sensuous account of strange and dramatic events punctuated by jazzy lists of everything from the places he’s called home to his favorite foods. Auster’s most piercing recollections are anchored to injury and illness, close calls and bad habits, age and ‘the ghoulish trigonometry of fate.’… Auster is startlingly forthright, mischievously funny, and unfailingly enrapturing as he transforms intimate memories into a zestful inquiry into the mind-body connection and the haphazard forging of a self.”

—Donna Seaman, Booklist, Starred Review

“This book is called a memoir, but as might be expected of the brilliantly offbeat award-winning author of The New York Trilogy, it’s not a standard retelling of life events. Instead, as he approaches his mid-Sixties, Auster considers bodily pain and pleasure, the passage of time, and the weight of memory, stirring in reflections on his mother’s life and death. High-minded readers will anticipate.”

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

“You think,” begins Auster in this quietly moving meditation on death and life, “it will never happen to you.” But because this is not fiction and Auster (Sunset Park) is as human as the rest of us, “one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.” The things that happen and which he chronicles are both momentous and mundane, the stuff of everyday life—the childhood baseball games, the succession of New York and Paris apartments (21 in total), even the women longed for, two of whom became wives—and the events that shook and shaped him. From the vantage point of the winter preceding his 64th birthday, Auster lets his body and its sensations guide his memories. There is no set chronology; time and place bleed from one year to another, between childhood and adulthood. His mother’s death in May 2002 is one of the most deeply resonant sections, drawing on childhood memories of her as a Cub Scout den mother—though she’d entered the “Land of Work”—along with her slow decline after the death of her second husband, made all the more painful as Auster relays it in retrospect, after the reader knows his mother is dead. This is the exquisitely wrought catalogue of a man’s history through his body, a body that has felt pain and pleasure because “ body always knows what the mind doesn’t know.” Agent: Carol Mann.(Aug.)

From the Publisher

"Celebrated author Auster (Sunset Park) observes his own life in this engaging memoir… Auster presents a fascinating take on the memoir. Students and fans will appreciate his original examination of his interior self." – Library Journal (Starred)

"This august author’s meandering meditation on time, aging, and the eventual death of his mother beguiled many readers with its mix of pungent poetics and humble reminiscence." – Elle Magazine, Readers’ Prize Winner

"His concerns will be familiar to many readers, but because he is Paul Auster, he is uniquely able to reflect on them for the rest of us…. Riveting… Writing in the second-person, almost as if talking about someone else or as if speaking with a stranger, Auster, oddly enough, establishes a powerful intimacy with the reader."— Haaretz

“[A] graceful, moving new memoir... a kaleidoscopic reflection from one of our most important writers as he enters life’s winter.... Auster’s brilliance is in how he makes his deep love for his subjects palpable.... With Winter Journal, Auster has given us a remarkable mosaic of his mother and his second wife, the most vital women in his life, while, at the same time, allowing readers to catch glimpses of themselves in the expansive life that’s woven together in this stirring memoir.” —Alex Lemon, Dallas Morning News

“Each year, when the inevitable hand-wringing begins over the American drought in winning the Nobel Prize for literature, I’m always surprised that more critics don’t push Paul Auster.... The recent knock against American literature is that it's ‘insular’ and ‘isolated,’ at least according to one grumpy Nobel Prize judge. As an antidote to those gripes, I’d like to press a few of Mr. Auster’s books into more Swedish hands…. Mr. Auster’s prose is sharp and the plots are coiled. And best of all, his stories are addictively entertaining…. Mr. Auster has written a spare meditation that’s thoroughly entertaining. In short, Winter Journal might contemplate the past, but it reinforces Paul Auster’s status as a writer at the peak of his talents.” —Cody Corliss, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Fascinating… Strikingly bold and original... Think of it as a literary cousin of Federico Fellini's semi-autobiographical film, ‘Amarcord’ (‘I remember’) — only this time, we watch the protagonist grow up and become pensively aware of his mortality.” —Doug Childers, Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Paul Auster’s novels are mesmerizing reverie, often chilly to the touch yet exploding with exponential warmth on deeper consideration. The same can be said for Winter Journal, a new memoir that comes three decades after his first, The Invention of Solitude. Here, Auster surveys the physical, emotional and spiritual landscapes of his life, then deconstructs these touchstones one unreliable memory at a time. Deeply musical, often darkly funny ruminations on baseball, becoming a middle-aged orphan after his mother’s passing, the enduring power of love, and an intimate history of his own body’s pains and pleasures weave together to confirm that while no one gets out of this world alive, each moment can be transcendent.” —J. Rentilly, American Way

“[A] powerful new memoir…. Periodically, Auster writes these long sentences, gently pulling them like threads from the fabric of his imagination. Perhaps you learned them as run-ons, but Auster’s are wonders of clarity and cumulative clout. As Auster escorts you through his life, you realize Winter Journal works like your own mind. It tells stories; it remembers, moves on, revisits; it sorts and classifies; it judges. Feels.” —Daniel Dyer, The Plain Dealer

“Readers of [Paul Auster’s] string of beguiling novels, which include The New York Trilogy, The Brooklyn Follies and Sunset Park, will enjoy picking out the autobiographical roots of some of his fiction…. Thoughtful ruminations on the nexus between the mundane and the meaningful, the physical and the emotional.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR.Org

“Unusual, affecting…. To experience Auster’s fixation on the body— and his way of staging that fixation as something you're complicit in—is to realize that most memoirs don't work this way. Not even the ones that focus on illness and death. Memoirs tend to be psychological studies of how one person's mind worked through something. Winter Journal instead foregrounds the physical; on the first page Auster states his intention to catalog ‘what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one.’ With psychological interpretations stripped off, what's left is a more visceral accounting…. What becomes clearer, and in its closing pages more potent, is the way this physical self-scrutiny amplifies his emotional responses.” —Mark Athitakis, Barnes & Noble Review

“[A] remarkable meditation on 'what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one.' Notice his use of the second person? One of the first pleasures of Winter Journal is its feeling of immediacy, as if we are inside Auster’s head staring with him into memory’s mirror, listening to him talk to himself.... Auster catalogs his memories with all the entertaining artistry of the best medieval poets.” —Alden Mudge, Bookpage (Top Nonfiction Pick for September)

“[In Winter Journal] one of the nation’s most revered fiction writers looks back at his life — and contemplates age and mortality — in a gripping memoir that hopscotches across the decades.”—Chris Waddington, New Orleans Times-Picayune

“Winter Journal takes up the conceit of a detachable self and develops it... An engaging book.” —James Campbell, The Wall Street Journal

“For a reader of a certain age, perhaps a male reader of a certain age, there's a sharp shudder of recognition at the admission of minor vices, of neglect and breakdown, of the slow ravages of the body over time. As someone who shares many of these predilections, I find myself rendered nearly breathless by Auster’s willingness to tell.” —David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“Winter Journal is far more elegiac than angry, more wistful than soaked in regret.... When you read Auster’s final page, you will feel you have been in the company of a man whose life has had more ups than downs, more times to celebrate than memories to drown. Added pleasure will come from the clear, inventive prose that has marked Auster’s equally inventive novels through the years, from his New York trilogy to more recent books like Invisible and Sunset Park.... When you reach the end of the book, you will have appreciated the journey as much as he clearly has.” —Dale Singer, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“An idiosyncratic memoir that is at times cerebral, at times bawdy, and in every sense consistently rewarding... Whether you experience what Auster calls the ‘journey through winter’ literally or figuratively, this book will serve as a worthy companion when you embark on it.” —Harvey Freedenberg, Bookreporter.com

“Auster’s memoir recalls his free-spirited mother and the history of his own body. We experience Auster’s appetite for food and drink and literature but foremost for sex, as well as the crippling panic attacks that plagued him after his mother’s death, the epiphany he experienced watching a dance performance that cured his writer’s block, and the intense shame of nearly killing his family in a car accident. Over time, as Auster’s body alternately ages and is revitalized, the composition of these elements creates an intimate symphony of selves, a song of the body for all seasons.” — Vanity Fair

“The acclaimed novelist, now 65, writes affectingly about his body, family, lovers, travels and residences as he enters what he calls the winter of his life…. Auster’s memoir courses gracefully over ground that is frequently rough, jarring and painful… A consummate professional explores the attic of his life, converting rumination to art.”

—Kirkus, Starred Review

“[A] quietly moving meditation on death and life… This is the exquisitely wrought catalogue of a man’s history through his body.”

—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“An intensely sensuous account of strange and dramatic events punctuated by jazzy lists of everything from the places he’s called home to his favorite foods. Auster’s most piercing recollections are anchored to injury and illness, close calls and bad habits, age and ‘the ghoulish trigonometry of fate.’… Auster is startlingly forthright, mischievously funny, and unfailingly enrapturing as he transforms intimate memories into a zestful inquiry into the mind-body connection and the haphazard forging of a self.”

—Donna Seaman, Booklist, Starred Review

“This book is called a memoir, but as might be expected of the brilliantly offbeat award-winning author of The New York Trilogy, it’s not a standard retelling of life events. Instead, as he approaches his mid-Sixties, Auster considers bodily pain and pleasure, the passage of time, and the weight of memory, stirring in reflections on his mother’s life and death. High-minded readers will anticipate.”

—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal

As might be expected of the brilliantly offbeat award-winning author of The New York Trilogy, this is not a standard retelling of life events. Instead, as he approaches his mid-sixties, Auster considers bodily pain and pleasure, the passage of time, and the weight of memory. High-minded readers will want.

Kirkus Reviews

The acclaimed novelist (Sunset Park, 2010, etc.), now 65, writes affectingly about his body, family, lovers, travels and residences as he enters what he calls the winter of his life. Written entirely in the second person and, loosely, using the format of a journal (undated entries), Auster's memoir courses gracefully over ground that is frequently rough, jarring and painful: the deaths of his parents, conflicts with his relatives (he settles some scores), poor decisions (his first marriage), accidents (a car crash that could have killed him) and struggles in his early career. But there are summery memories, as well: his love of baseball (begun in boyhood), his fondness for Campbell's chicken noodle soup, his relationship with his mother, world travels (not all cheery; he recalls a near fistfight with a French taxi driver), books and friends. Most significant: his 30-year relationship with his wife, writer Siri Hustvedt (unnamed here), whom he continually celebrates. Some of the loveliest sentences in the text--and there are many--are illuminated by love. Near the end, Auster recalls visits with her family in Minnesota, a terrain so unlike what he knew (he lives in Brooklyn). Here, too, are moments of failure (not speaking up when he should have), of illness and injury, of sly humor. The author follows a grim description of a bout with the crabs with a paean to nature that begins, "Ladybugs were considered good luck." Auster indulges in the occasional rant--he goes off on the crudities of contemporary culture--and delivers numerous moments of artful craft. A consummate professional explores the attic of his life, converting rumination to art.

The Washington Post

In turns contemplative, pugnacious and achingly tender, Auster, who may be one of the most imaginative writers living and working in America today, gives us a blow-by-blow account of his collision with life—a chronicle of scars, fears, deaths and afflictions that have hounded him to his promontory of 64 years. That he manages to plumb memory all the way to universal bedrock is a credit to his artistry. By the end of this hallucinatory journey, he is likely to have told something of your story as well.
—Marie Arana

Publishers Weekly

In this captivating memoir, Auster tells his own story, recalling early years, travels, his first marriage and child, and various family deaths. Finally, he turns his attention to his glamorous and lonely mother and his second wife, novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt. In a steady voice with a slight New Jersey accent, Auster himself narrates this audio edition. His voice is thoughtful and intense, and he reads at a steady clip, enunciating each word carefully and employing a perfect French accent when needed. Auster's voice and his story are mesmerizing; listeners will not be disappointed. A Holt hardcover.

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

More by this Author

Paul Auster is the bestselling author of Sunset Park, Invisible, Man in the Dark, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. His books have been translated into forty-three languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Read an Excerpt

WINTER JOURNAL (Chapter 1)

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else.

Your bare feet on the cold floor as you climb out of bed and walk to the window. You are six years old. Outside, snow is falling, and the branches of the trees in the backyard are turning white.

Speak now before it is too late, and then hope to go on speaking until there is nothing more to be said. Time is running out, after all. Perhaps it is just as well to put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one. A catalogue of sensory data. What one might call a phenomenology of breathing.

You are ten years old, and the midsummer air is warm, oppressively warm, so humid and uncomfortable that even as you sit in the shade of the trees in the backyard, sweat is gathering on your forehead.

It is an incontestable fact that you are no longer young. One month from today, you will be turning sixty-four, and although that is not excessively old, not what anyone would consider to be an advanced old age, you cannot stop yourself from thinking about all the others who never managed to get as far as you have. This is one example of the various things that could never happen, but which, in fact, have happened.

The wind in your face during last week’s blizzard. The awful sting of the cold, and you out there in the empty streets wondering what possessed you to leave the house in such a pounding storm, and yet, even as you struggled to keep your balance, there was the exhilaration of that wind, the joy of seeing the familiar streets turned into a blur of white, whirling snow.

Physical pleasures and physical pains. Sexual pleasures first and foremost, but also the pleasures of food and drink, of lying naked in a hot bath, of scratching an itch, of sneezing and farting, of spending an extra hour in bed, of turning your face toward the sun on a mild afternoon in late spring or early summer and feeling the warmth settle upon your skin. Innumerable instances, not a day gone by without some moment or moments of physical pleasure, and yet pains are no doubt more persistent and intractable, and at one time or another nearly every part of your body has been subjected to assault. Eyes and ears, head and neck, shoulders and back, arms and legs, throat and stomach, ankles and feet, not to mention the enormous boil that once sprouted on the left cheek of your ass, referred to by the doctor as a wen, which to your ears sounded like some medieval affliction and prevented you from sitting in chairs for a week.

The proximity of your small body to the ground, the body that belonged to you when you were three and four years old, that is to say, the shortness of the distance between your feet and head, and how the things you no longer notice were once a constant presence and preoccupation for you: the little world of crawling ants and lost coins, of fallen twigs and dented bottle caps, of dandelions and clover. But especially the ants. They are what you remember best. Armies of ants traveling in and out of their powdery hills.

You are five years old, crouched over an anthill in the backyard, attentively studying the comings and goings of your tiny six-legged friends. Unseen and unheard, your three-year-old neighbor creeps up behind you and strikes you on the head with a toy rake. The prongs pierce your scalp, blood flows into your hair and down the back of your neck, and you run screaming into the house, where your grandmother tends to your wounds.

Your grandmother’s words to your mother: “Your father would be such a wonderful man—if only he were different.”

This morning, waking in the dimness of another January dawn, a scumbled, grayish light seeping into the bedroom, and there is your wife’s face turned toward your face, her eyes closed, still fast asleep, the covers pulled all the way up to her neck, her head the only part of her that is visible, and you marvel at how beautiful she looks, how young she looks, even now, thirty years after you first slept with her, after thirty years of living together under the same roof and sharing the same bed.

More snow falling today, and as you climb out of bed and walk to the window, the branches of the trees in the back garden are turning white. You are sixty-three years old. It occurs to you that there has rarely been a moment during the long journey from boyhood to now when you have not been in love. Thirty years of marriage, yes, but in the thirty years before that, how many infatuations and crushes, how many ardors and pursuits, how many deliriums and mad surges of desire? From the very start of your conscious life, you have been a willing slave of Eros. The girls you loved as a boy, the women you loved as a man, each one different from the others, some round and some lean, some short and some tall, some bookish and some athletic, some moody and some outgoing, some white and some black and some Asian, nothing on the surface ever mattered to you, it was all about the inner light you would detect in her, the spark of singularity, the blaze of revealed selfhood, and that light would make her beautiful to you, even if others were blind to the beauty you saw, and then you would burn to be with her, to be near her, for feminine beauty is something you have never been able to resist. All the way back to your first days of school, the kindergarten class in which you fell for the girl with the long blonde ponytail, and how often were you punished by Miss Sandquist for sneaking off with the little girl you had fallen for, the two of you together in a corner somewhere making mischief, but those punishments meant nothing to you, for you were in love, and you were a fool for love then, just as you are a fool for love now.

The inventory of your scars, in particular the ones on your face, which are visible to you each morning when you look into the bathroom mirror to shave or comb your hair. You seldom think about them, but whenever you do, you understand that they are marks of life, that the assorted jagged lines etched into the skin of your face are letters from the secret alphabet that tells the story of who you are, for each scar is the trace of a healed wound, and each wound was caused by an unexpected collision with the world—that is to say, an accident, or something that need not have happened, since by definition an accident is something that need not happen. Contingent facts as opposed to necessary facts, and the realization as you look into the mirror this morning that all life is contingent, except for the one necessary fact that sooner or later it will come to an end.

You are three and a half, and your twenty-five-year-old pregnant mother has taken you along with her on a shopping expedition to a department store in downtown Newark. She is accompanied by a friend of hers, the mother of a boy who is three and a half as well. At some point, you and your little comrade break away from your mothers and begin running through the store. It is an enormous open space, no doubt the largest room you have ever set foot in, and there is a palpable thrill in being able to run wild through this gargantuan indoor arena. Eventually, you and the boy begin belly-flopping onto the floor and sliding along the smooth surface, sledding without sleds, as it were, and this game proves to be so enjoyable, so ecstatic in the pleasure it produces, that you become more and more reckless, more and more daring in what you are willing to attempt. You reach a part of the store where construction work or repair work is under way, and without bothering to take notice of what obstacles might lie ahead, you belly-flop onto the floor again and sail along the glasslike surface until you find yourself speeding straight toward a wooden carpenter’s bench. With a small twist of your small body, you think you can avoid crashing into the leg of the table that is looming before you, but what you do not realize in the split second you have to shift course is that a nail is jutting from the leg, a long nail low enough to be at the level of your face, and before you can stop yourself, your left cheek is pierced by the nail as you go flying past it. Half your face is torn apart. Sixty years later, you have no memories of the accident. You remember the running and the belly-flopping, but nothing about the pain, nothing about the blood, and nothing about being rushed to the hospital or the doctor who sewed up your cheek. He did a brilliant job, your mother always said, and since the trauma of seeing her firstborn with half his face ripped off never left her, she said it often: something to do with a subtle double-stitching method that kept the damage to a minimum and prevented you from being disfigured for life. You could have lost your eye, she would say to you—or, even more dramatically, You could have been killed. No doubt she was right. The scar has grown fainter and fainter as the years have passed, but it is still there whenever you look for it, and you will carry that emblem of good fortune (eye intact! not dead!) until you go to your grave.

Split eyebrow scars, one left and one right, almost perfectly symmetrical, the first caused by running full tilt into a brick wall during a dodgeball game in grade school gym class (the massively swollen black eye you sported for days afterward, which reminded you of a photograph of boxer Gene Fullmer, who had been defeated in a championship bout by Sugar Ray Robinson around the same time) and the second caused in your early twenties when you drove in for a layup during an outdoor basketball game, were fouled from behind, and flew into the metal pole supporting the basket. Another scar on your chin, origin unknown. Most likely from an early childhood spill, a hard fall onto a sidewalk or a stone that split open your flesh and left its mark, which is still visible whenever you shave in the morning. No story accompanies this scar, your mother never talked about it (at least not that you can recall), and you find it odd, if not downright perplexing, that this permanent line was engraved on your chin by what can only be called an invisible hand, that your body is the site of events that have been expunged from history.

It is June 1959. You are twelve years old, and in one week you and your sixth-grade classmates will be graduating from the grammar school you have attended since you were five. It is a splendid day, late spring in its most lustrous incarnation, sunlight pouring down from a cloudless blue sky, warm but not too warm, scant humidity, a soft breeze stirring the air and rippling over your face and neck and bare arms. Once school lets out for the day, you and a gang of your friends repair to Grove Park for a game of pickup baseball. Grove Park is not a park so much as a kind of village green, a large rectangle of well-tended grass flanked by houses on all four sides, a pleasant spot, one of the loveliest public spaces in your small New Jersey town, and you and your friends often go there to play baseball after school, since baseball is the thing you all love most, and you play for hours on end without ever growing weary of it. No adults are present. You establish your own ground rules and settle disagreements among yourselves—most often with words, occasionally with fists. More than fifty years later, you remember nothing about the game that was played that afternoon, but what you do remember is the following: The game is over, and you are standing alone in the middle of the infield, playing catch with yourself, that is, throwing a ball high into the air and following its ascent and descent until it lands in your glove, at which point you immediately throw the ball into the air again, and each time you throw the ball it travels higher than it did the time before, and after several throws you are reaching unprecedented heights, the ball is hovering in the air for many seconds now, the white ball going up against the clear blue sky, the white ball coming down into your glove, and your entire being is engaged in this witless activity, your concentration is total, nothing exists now except the ball and the sky and your glove, which means that your face is turned upward, that you are looking up as you follow the trajectory of the ball, and therefore you are no longer aware of what is happening on the ground, and what happens on the ground as you are looking up at the sky is that something or someone unexpectedly comes crashing into you, and the impact is so sudden, so violent, so overwhelming in its force that you instantly fall to the ground, feeling as though you have been hit by a tank. The brunt of the blow was aimed at your head, in particular your forehead, but your torso has been battered as well, and as you lie on the ground gasping for breath, stunned and nearly unconscious, you see that blood is flowing from your forehead, no, not flowing, gushing, and so you remove your white T-shirt and press it against the gushing spot, and within seconds the white T-shirt has turned entirely red. The other boys are alarmed. They come rushing toward you to do what they can to help, and it is only then that you find out what happened. It seems that one of your cohort, a gangly, good-hearted lunkhead called B.T. (you remember his name but will not divulge it here, since you do not want to embarrass him—assuming he is still alive), was so impressed by your towering, skyscraper throws that he got it into his head to take part in the action, and without bothering to tell you that he, too, was going to try to catch one of your throws started running in the direction of the descending ball, head turned upward, of course, and mouth hanging open in that oafish way of his (what person runs with his mouth hanging open?), and when he crashed into you a moment later, running at an all-out gallop, the teeth protruding from his open mouth went straight into your head. Hence the blood now gushing out of you, hence the depth of the gash in the skin above your left eye. Fortunately, the office of your family doctor is just across the way, in one of the houses that line the perimeter of Grove Park. The boys decide to lead you there at once, and so you cross the park holding your bloody T-shirt against your head in the company of your friends, perhaps four of them, perhaps six of them, you no longer remember, and burst en masse into Dr. Kohn’s office. (You have not forgotten his name, just as you have not forgotten the name of your kindergarten teacher, Miss Sandquist, or the names of any of the other teachers you had as a boy.) The receptionist tells you and your friends that Dr. Kohn is seeing a patient just now, and before she can get up from her chair to inform the doctor that there is an emergency to attend to, you and your friends march into the consulting room without bothering to knock. You find Dr. Kohn talking to a plump, middle-aged woman who is sitting on the examination table dressed in a bra and slip only. The woman lets out a yelp of surprise, but once Dr. Kohn sees the blood gushing from your forehead, he tells the woman to get dressed and leave, tells your friends to make themselves scarce, and then hastens to the task of sewing up your wound. It is a painful procedure, since there is no time to administer an anesthetic, but you do your best not to howl as he threads the stitches through your skin. The job he does is perhaps not as brilliant as the one executed by the doctor who sewed up your cheek in 1950, but it is effective for all that, since you do not bleed to death and no longer have a hole in your head. Some days later, you and your sixth-grade classmates take part in your grammar school graduation ceremony. You have been selected to be a flag-bearer, which means that you must carry the American flag down an aisle of the auditorium and plant it in the flag stand on stage. Your head is wrapped in a white gauze bandage, and because blood still seeps occasionally from the spot where you were stitched up, the white gauze has a large red stain on it. After the ceremony, your mother says that when you were walking down the aisle with the flag, you reminded her of a painting of a wounded Revolutionary War hero. You know, she says, just like The Spirit of ’76.

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